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Category: Events

Events I attend to, or that I hear from.

WordCamp Geneva 2016

Published November 19, 2016 by Ivan

WordCamp Geneva 2016View of Geneva with the Alps at the back and the logo of WordCamp Geneva over the city

WordCamp Switzerland 2016 has been a great event.

WordCamp Geneva 2016 logo

Many interesting topics arose during #wcgva. I pick the following points as the ones that made the most impact.

The most important thing was the forthcoming WordPress REST API, who will allow WordPress to support a vast range of requirements. From 2017 on WordPress will be capable of dealing with content that updates continuously in a proper way, and to do it without human intervention.

When you consider the envisage tide of IoT future applications, the prospect is most WordPress installations will manage their content through this interface in a few years.

I also think that it is very meaningful that a lot of discussions were focused on WordPress backend and the services it provides to its users. The panel What is missing in WordPress to be the perfect CMS devoted its attention entirely to backend features. In addition, Mark Howells-Mead discussed the WordPress possibilities as a headless CMS, taking advantage of legacy systems like Typo3 or expertise on front-end technologies like AngularJS.

Add this to what I’ve said in the previous point and we face a new scenario where WordPress acts mainly as a fully-fledged content management system and no longer as a PHP framework to easily develop websites. This is a huge change for the product.

Big news: WordPress core is advancing towards proper multi-language support. WordPress 4.7 will provide a host of new internationalization features that hopefully will pave the road for easier multilingual sites development.

I don’t expect WordPress to pull the rug out under their partners feet, so plugins like WPML, Bogo or MultilingualPress will most probably still be required to build proper multilingual sites, but developing content services for markets that span more than one language (welcome to globalization!) is a requirement that should be fulfilled easier with future WordPress releases.

Last, it was very interesting to hear Beatrice Otto‘s dissertation on the struggle of a non-computer-savvy professional when developing her first WordPress project.

A necessary call to user friendliness to developers, designers and technical writers who have devoted time and effort to master tools and jargon, and who are making products for people who do not have the time or money to acquire the same background. We must work better.

Any thoughts about these topics? What feature do you miss in WordPress?

I look forward to your comments… and to the next WordCamp.

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WordPress Performance meeting in Bern

Published September 23, 2016 by Ivan

Yesterday I attended the WordPress Bern Group session on Performance Optimization.

WordPress Bern Group

It was a pleasant and interesting meeting (though my poor Swiss German skills) where Nico Martin from vir2al websolutions discussed the most obvious topics to look after when optimizing a WordPress (actually, any) site:

The image load hugely depends on the image size, which in turn depends on the image dimensions and resolution. You must balance the required quality and dimensions for the actual display device to use in your pages.

If you think this is not such an issue, multiply all your site’s images for the number of different size versions when developing a responsive design. I assume you want your site to run fast and be handsome on every possible screen, do you?

Herr Martin discussed the benefits of using progressive jpeg, a question that has supporters and antagonists. He also demonstrated the EWWW Image Optimizer WordPress plugin, which streamlines image optimization.

As for the code minification, he demonstrated how to do it easily by using the Sublime Text editor and Autoptimize WordPress plugin.

Of course this only addresses the removal of spurious characters and not proper code optimization, but the latter is a much larger issue that deals with the quality of your developers’ work.

He also recalled the usual tactics of moving scripts to the footer of the page in order to improve the perceived performance. Not something that is always feasible, but certainly worth to consider.

Finally Nico Martin demonstrated Google’s PageSpeed Insights to test the load time of different webpages, both their desktop and mobile renderings.

WP Bern is a group that’s well worth to check out if you have any interest in web development. I also attended the session on [WordPress Backup & Restore] which was really interesting, too.

You may read about their activities in the WP Bern homesite and join their meetings by using their Meetup group

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